Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘We need to find a way to recode its RNA,’ said Anna. ‘We need to make it think that it’s mutating into something new, when in fact it’s simply repeating itself. Over and over.’

  ‘Well, I believe I may have some ideas on that,’ Doctor Ahmet told her. ‘I managed a similar trick with the variola virus in Gumla in 2011. Of course variola is a DNA virus, but I don’t see why we can’t do pretty much the same with this one.’

  ‘I’m relying on you, Rafik. I just have to go up to the path lab for a while. Page me if you need anything.’

  ‘Anna, before you go—’

  ‘What is it, Rafik?’

  ‘I want you to know you have my greatest feeling of compassion,’ he said. He took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and blinked at her with his large brown eyes. ‘I realize that for you it is still very soon after the tragic event, but the day after my father died, and I was so stricken with grief, my mother said to me, “You can honor the dead by focusing on new life.”’ He paused, and then he said, ‘That helped me very much to understand why we are here, you know, and what is the purpose of grief.’

  ‘Thanks, Rafik,’ said Anna. She leaned forward and kissed his wiry black-bearded cheek.

  Upstairs in the pathology department, Doctor Rutgers was waiting for her. Henry Rutgers was tall but round-shouldered, with a shock of white hair that rose vertically from the top of his head like a cartoon of somebody who has been scared by a ghost. He had a lived-in, baggy, Walter Matthau kind of face, with hexagonal rimless spectacles that he kept perched on the very end of his bulbous nose.

  John Patrick Bridges was lying naked on the autopsy table, his skin so bloodless and gray that he looked almost silver. So far Doctor Rutgers had not yet started to cut him open, but his assistant had laid out all of the required instruments: the bone-cutting forceps for splitting his sternum, the retractors for holding his chest cavity open, and all the various scalpels that he would need for taking organ and tissue samples.

  ‘How are you, professor?’ Doctor Rutgers greeted her. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you, Henry. That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Well, I know what a shock it is, and how much it hurts. You never get over it, whatever anybody says.’

  Anna knew that Doctor Rutgers had lost his only son in a skiing accident last year and how deeply it had affected him. She didn’t say anything, though. She didn’t trust herself not to start crying again.

  ‘I read your little paper last month in the AJE,’ said Doctor Rutgers. He was obviously making a deliberate effort to change the subject.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘I must say you have some very bold views on causal association in avian flu. That must have ruffled a few feathers, if you’ll excuse the idiom.’

  Anna gave him the briefest of smiles. ‘Sometimes – yes – there’s a very fine line between what could cause an epidemic and what actually did. Occasionally, I think we should be given the legal sanction to cross it and be a little more forensic.’

  ‘Anyhow, talking of what could and what did,’ said Doctor Rutgers, ‘I carried out a very thorough examination of the skin surfaces of the gentleman we have before us and also of your late partner, Mr David Russell.’

  ‘I thought that Doctor Lim had already done that.’

  ‘Michael? Yes, he had indeed. But I always insist on carrying out all my own histological examinations from scratch, even if one might have been carried out by another pathologist before me. That’s not to say that I mistrust the medical expertise of my colleagues. It’s just that I have a very good eye for what doesn’t seem quite normal. Well – you have only to look at my wife!’ He paused and looked at Anna over his spectacles. ‘My apologies, Anna. I’m afraid that twenty-six years of pathology have turned me into rather a second-rate comedian.’

  Anna shook her head. She really didn’t mind. She had worked long enough with the sick and the dying and the desperate to know that most of her profession developed a dark sense of humor in order to deal with the endless pity of it. As a rule she found that the sicker the jokes that doctors told, the more sensitive they were and the more they cared.

  Doctor Rutgers beckoned her toward the autopsy table. He lifted John Patrick Bridges’s right shoulder and pointed to a row of four tiny brown dots across his back. It would have been easy to mistake them for minor acne blemishes, or moles, or not to even notice them at all.

  ‘What do these remind you of?’ Doctor Rutgers asked her.

  Anna frowned at them closely. ‘They look as if they’re punctate lesions of some kind, but quite minor ones. They could have been made by a hypodermic needle, but more likely they’re insect bites.’

  ‘Does their formation tell you anything?’

  ‘They’re almost in a straight line. Is that significant?’

  Doctor Rutgers said, ‘It could be. There’s one insect that tends to bite its victims in straight lines instead of puncturing them here, there and everywhere, and that’s Cimex lectularius.’

  ‘The common bedbug?’

  ‘That’s the fellow. The same noxious little bloodsucker that infests houses, motels and hotels the length and breadth of these United States in his zillions of millions.’

  ‘But bedbugs don’t transmit disease to humans. They can be infected themselves by nearly thirty human pathogens, but they don’t normally pass them on to us, do they? Not unless we happen to scratch their bites and break the skin and acquire an infection that way.’

  ‘Ah, but what they can do is make us crazy,’ said Doctor Rutgers. ‘Quite a high percentage of people who have been bitten by bedbugs have developed serious psychological conditions, such as anxiety and PTSD – even a form of schizophrenia. Now, not many other bugs can do that, can they?’

  ‘OK, I agree. But they still don’t make us hemorrhage and have convulsions at the same time.’

  Doctor Rutgers shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ve evolved. There’s been a pretty concerted nationwide effort to exterminate them. Maybe they’re fighting back. If viruses can mutate in order for their species to survive, why not bedbugs?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Anna. ‘The Curse of the Adaptive Bedbugs? It sounds like some really crappy horror movie.’

  ‘Anna – your partner has similar lesions. Seven of them, to be exact.’

  ‘David?’ Anna suddenly felt as if her skin were shrinking. ‘He had them too? I never saw them! Where?’

  ‘Here,’ said Doctor Rutgers, pointing to his own right hip. ‘They’re all arranged in a slightly uneven line, from his back, here, all the way around to his stomach.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? I didn’t see them.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You were obviously very stressed when he was taken sick, and you were concentrating on saving his life, not on giving him a histological once-over. The lesions are very faint, and the punctures themselves are microscopic. But they do look remarkably like this gentleman’s lesions, and of course their symptoms are almost exactly similar. Which side did David usually sleep on, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘His – his left,’ said Anna, abstractedly. ‘Why? What difference does that make?’

  ‘Not much. Except that bedbugs usually attack exposed areas of skin while their victim is lying asleep, and these bites were on the side of his body which would have been uppermost.’

  ‘I need to get in touch with the hotel he was staying in, when he was in Chicago, and warn them they have bedbugs.’

  ‘Hey – hey – hold your horses!’ said Doctor Rutgers. ‘We don’t even know for sure if these are bedbug bites yet, or, even if they are, where your David and this other guy got bitten. It could have been in some hotel. While you’re staying in a hotel for a couple of days, bedbugs can crawl into the seams of your luggage and lay thousands of eggs, and you can take them home with you! Bedbugs can even hide inside your nice warm laptop, for Christ’s sake! God alone knows how many thousands of bedbugs are circling around the world even now, courtesy of Sam
sonite and Apple.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘Anna – all that apart, we still don’t know why these two suffered such severe convulsions and such catastrophic hemorrhage. Maybe bedbug bites had nothing to do with them dying. But I did think it important that you took a look at them, in case you come across any similar lesions in the next few days or weeks. It could very well be that these are two isolated cases, and that we won’t see or hear of any more. I darn well hope not. But on the other hand—’

  ‘Can I see him?’ asked Anna.

  ‘David? Oh. Maybe that’s not such a good idea.’

  ‘Why not? You can show me the bites on his hip.’

  ‘I honestly think it would be better for you if you didn’t.’

  ‘Henry – I’m a qualified professional. This may be the man I love, but I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies before, and I’m not going to faint.’

  ‘Anna … he suffered what I can only describe as unusual rigor mortis. For some reason his face became kind of contorted. We don’t know what caused it, but I don’t think you’d like to remember him that way.’

  So, she thought, he still looks terrified, the way he looked when I last saw him and when he was begging me to help him. It made her wonder if he were really dead, or if he were trapped in some numbing paralysis, locked in a vice-like state of utter dread for the rest of his life, his heart arrested, his breathing stopped, but his mind still aware of everything that was going on around him and more. Because how had his tongue emerged from his mouth and licked his lips? Unless it hadn’t been his tongue at all? When Doctor Rutgers opened him up, what would he find inside him?

  Anna had been hoping that David’s face would have relaxed by now and that he looked peaceful again. But Doctor Rutgers was right. She didn’t want to see him that way, looking so frightened. And she didn’t want to think what the results of his autopsy were going to be, either.

  Doctor Rutgers laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I have my preliminary results,’ he promised her. ‘In fact, I’ll tell you before I tell anybody else.’

  ‘Just be careful, Henry,’ she told him.

  ‘Well, of course,’ he said. It was obvious that he didn’t really understand what she meant, but she wasn’t going to explain herself any more than that, because she didn’t really know herself. She was still in shock, after all.

  She left the path lab. As the door swung shut behind her, she saw Doctor Rutgers reach across to the tray of instruments and pick up a scalpel.

  EIGHT

  As you can imagine, I didn’t sleep too good that night. I kept the blind open, but when I wasn’t having nightmares about faceless nuns climbing over my window sill and standing motionless at the end of my bed, I was awake and looking up at all of those witches and monkeys dancing across the ceiling.

  Eventually, though, it began to grow light. The witches and monkeys faded, and I could clearly see that no diminutive nuns were creeping toward my window through the shrubbery. I rolled out of bed and padded into the kitchenette to make myself a mug of horseshoe coffee. That’s what the tracklayers on the Union Pacific railroad used to call a very strong brew, because they reckoned that a horseshoe would float in it.

  I seriously wondered if I ought to talk to a priest about the nun appearing in my bedroom. I’m pretty superstitious – like, I throw two pinches of salt over my left shoulder if ever I spill any, to keep the Devil off my back, and as you know I believe in the supernatural, insofar as just about everything in this ridiculous world is supernatural. I’m not religious, though, except in those moments when I’m so shit-scared that only God can possibly help me out. But a priest might have a better idea than most why this spooky nun had paid me a visit and what she wanted.

  The only priest I knew in Miami Beach was the Reverend Father Jose Zapata (yes, really, Zapata, as in Viva!), one of the team from St Francis de Sales Church on Lenox Avenue. I knew him only because I’d bumped into him after he’d given holy communion at home to one of my clients, Mrs Nora Washburn. He was young, and skinny, and incredibly talkative, with very white teeth, so that when he opened his mouth you could almost believe that Christianity was a brand of toothpaste. He’d told me that in his opinion fortune-telling was little better than the sales department of Satanism, but in spite of that my upbeat predictions had been very beneficial for Mrs Washburn’s constitution. The only reason she hadn’t died yet was because she was so desperate to know what was going to happen to her next.

  After two mugs of coffee and a slice of toast and boysenberry jelly, I drove up to St Francis de Sales to see if the Reverend Father Zapata was around. I had an hour to kill before my first card-reading of the day, and I didn’t care too much if I was late because my client was a seventy-year-old retired house painter named Joey Vespucci and all he ever wanted to know was the next day’s winners at Gulfstream Park. Fortunately, I had an old acquaintance in the thoroughbred business, Mickey ‘The Stirrup’ O’Brien, and it was uncanny how many of my predictions came first past the post. (Well, it seemed uncanny to Joey, who always gave me ten percent of his winnings out of gratitude.) What I didn’t much like about Joey was that he was a sweaty lard-butt who never opened a window and that he repeatedly broke wind while I was laying out his cards.

  I turned into the parking lot behind St Francis de Sales just as the Reverend Father Zapata came whizzing around the side of the church on his bicycle. He was wearing a gold crash helmet and mirror sunglasses and a black Lycra cycling outfit. I called out to him while he was bumping his bicycle up the church’s back steps. ‘Hey! Father Zapata!’

  He turned and took off his sunglasses and stood up straight, as if he had been unexpectedly paged by an angel.

  I went across and climbed up the steps to join him. ‘I don’t know if you remember me, father. Harry Erskine. We met at Mrs Washburn’s.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I recall.’ He had near-together eyes and a prominent, complicated nose, like every keen cyclist I’ve ever met. I think those kind of noses help them to cleave their way through the air. It was already very hot, and perspiration was trickling down his cheeks like blood from the crown of thorns. ‘I remember. You’re the fortune-teller.’

  ‘Predictor of personal destinies, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, smiling. ‘However we like to think of ourselves, that is what we are.’ He had quite a strong Mexican accent, and he spoke rather pedantically, making a point of pronouncing the ends of his words. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Erskine?’

  ‘Is there someplace we can talk?’ I asked him. ‘Some really wacky stuff happened to me yesterday, and I think it may have some kind of religious connotation, although I’m damned if I can work out what it is. Well – when I say damned, I don’t mean it literally, the way that you guys do.’

  ‘“Wacky stuff”?’ asked Father Zapata. ‘What exactly do you mean by “wacky stuff”?’

  ‘Well, weird rather than wacky, First of all, the pictures on some of my fortune-telling cards – they changed.’

  Father Zapata blinked at me. ‘What exactly do you mean, changed?’

  ‘Like they changed, entirely by themselves. Not all of them, but some of them. I had cards that used to show scenes of people laughing and dancing and counting out their money, that kind of thing, but now they’re showing people stabbing each other and cutting off their children’s heads and boiling each other in oil.’

  Father Zapata wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand and stared at me with his dark, glittery eyes. ‘They have changed by themselves?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You said “first of all” the cards changed. What else has been happening?’

  ‘Well, this is the main reason why I thought of coming to talk to you, father. The cards, OK, they could have been changed by some kind of occult aberration, some kind of seismic shift in the spirit-world, if you understand what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m not too sure I do, either, but the point is that a nun appeared in my bedroom last night.’

  ‘A nun?’

  ‘She was all dressed in black, with her face covered over. I don’t know how she got into my house because only this narrow skylight was open and I didn’t see her come in. When I managed to switch on a light, she vanished.’

  ‘Had you been drinking, or taking any other stimulant?’

  ‘Father, when I drink, or take any other stimulant, I don’t see nuns, believe me. I see go-go girls. I’d had two or three whiskies at John Martin’s Irish Pub, but that was all.’

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ said Father Zapata.

  He wheeled his bicycle in through the open door at the back of the church and propped it up against the wall. Then he took off his golden helmet and led me along the corridor. We went into a small side room furnished with three saggy green armchairs, a side-table with a bowl of withered apples on it and a glass-fronted bookcase filled with bibles and other religious books. Jesus stared down at us sadly from his crucifix on the wall. He was the double of my bandleader friend Ramone.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ said Father Zapata. ‘Can I get you a soda, maybe, or a glass of water?’

  ‘How about a glass of communion wine? No, just kidding – I’m fine, thanks, father. I just hope I’m not wasting your time here. I mean, maybe you’re right and I was just hallucinating.’

  ‘I hope very much that you were hallucinating, Mr Erskine.’

  ‘Please – call me Harry. Even people who hate my guts call me Harry.’

  ‘Very well. But the appearance of a nun in your bedroom—’ He paused for a moment, searching for the right words. ‘In the Roman Catholic Church we recognize that as a very particular type of paranormal manifestation. Officially, it’s called Loudun Syndrome.’

  ‘You mean like a ghost?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes. But it would probably be more accurate to call it a presence than a ghost.’